Introduction

Few visitors were as objective and expert as Frederick Law Olmsted in
appraising the plantation system. This Hartford-born scientific farmer was
the son of a prosperous merchant, who afforded him the opportunity of
studying agricultural science and engineering at Yale. As a result of a stay
in England he published the interesting Walks and Talks of an American
Farmer in England (1852), noting rural life and city workmen,
particularly the Liverpool working class. Much of the time he cultivated a
130-acre farm on Staten Island, which was devoted in large part to fruit
trees. By the time he came to study the plantation system, he had a
practicing expert's knowledge of farming.

Olmsted had
already made up his mind about the evils of slavery before he accepted a
journalistic assignment to visit the slave states extended by a fellow
Free-Soiler, Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Daily Times. On December
11, 1852, he set out on a fourteen-month tour starting from Virginia down
through the Deep South to Texas. He wrote his newspaper articles as he went
along, and these became the substance of a trilogy of books,A Journey in
the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857),
and A Journey in the Back Country (1860). These were condensed and
considerably revised in The Cotton Kingdom (1861), just before the
outbreak of war. In future years, Olmsted was to embark on a brilliant
career as one of America's foremost landscape architects, designer of New
York's Central Park and the White City at the Chicago's World
Fair.

He hoped by his writings to convince planters that
slavery did not pay -a mission not unlike that of Hinton R. Helper's The
Impending Crisis of the South(1857), which appeared shortly after
Olmsted's first book; but Olmnsted's was a far more reliable and descriptive
work than the polemic volume of the North Carolinian rebel. His acute
interviews, his highly readable dialog, and his evaluative skill made his
work easily the best account extant of the Old South and plantation
slavery.